Books

Explain Pain

David Butler and Lorimer Moseley

A ground-breaking concept in its content and presentation, Explain Pain demystifies the process of understanding and managing pain. It brings the body to life in a way that makes an interesting read for therapists and pain sufferers alike.

All pain is real, and for many people it is a debilitating part of everyday life. It is now known that understanding more about why things hurt can actually help people to understand their pain. Recent advances in fields such as neurophysiology, brain imaging, immunology, psychology and cellular biology have provided an explanatory platform from which to explore pain. In everyday language accompanied by quirky illustrations, Explain Pain discusses how pain responses are produced by the brain: how responses to injury from the autonomic motor and immune systems in your body contribute to pain, and why pain can persist after tissues have had plenty of time to heal.

Explain Pain aims to give clinicians and people in pain the power to challenge pain and to consider new models for viewing what happens during pain. Once they have learnt about the processes involved they can follow a scientific route to recovery.

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Reviews

The book lives up to its title in ‘explaining pain’ I highly recommend this book for everyone… the information in this book will help many improve function and lead a more functional life…’

‘This book is recommended as a useful resource for any clinician working with patients in pain…’

‘I can’t think of any practitioner who deals with pain who shouldn’t read this book… the information should have immediate application in clinical practice, as does the book itself in terms of a patient education resource…’

‘I would recommend this book to women’s health PTs seeing pain patients.’

Explain Pain with David and Lorimer

Other books by David Butler

The Sensitive Nervous System

The Sensitive Nervous System updates and integrates the growing science of neurodynamics into current practise. Physical examination of the nervous system is carefully illustrated and explained, and management strategies are underpinned by cutting-edge neurobiology and evidence-based medicine.

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Mobilisation of the nervous system

Describes an innovative concept of examination and treatment technique. Clinical reasoning processes are associated with a new understanding of the nervous system as a dynamic continuum: mechanical, chemical and electrical aspects are interrelated, and interference with any part may have implications for the whole.

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Painful Yarns

Lorimer Moseley

This much anticipated collection of stories, written by Oxford University Fellow and Pain Scientist,
Dr GL Moseley, provides an entertaining and informative way to understand modern pain biology.

Described by critics as ‘a gem’ and by clinicians as ‘entertaining and educative’, Painful Yarns is a unique book. The stories, some of his travels in outback Australia, some of experiences growing up, are great yarns. At the end of each story, there is a section “so what has this got to do with pain?” in which Lorimer uses the story as a metaphor for some aspect of pain biology.

The level of the pain education is appropriate for patients and health professionals. The entertainment is good for everyone. You don’t have to be interested in pain to get something from this book and a laugh or two!

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Reviews

“Moseley is pain management’s answer to James Herriot. This book captures that illusive ability to both educate and entertain.”

Dr Michael Thacker, Director, Pain Science Program, Kings College, London

“When reading, it is always a good sign when you start to cry from laughing….this is clearly the best book about clinical pain that I have ever read.”

Dr John Keltner, MD (Harvard) Pain Physician, Anethiologist and Research fellow, Oxford University.

“Painful yarns are about life. The way Moseley turns them into metaphors about pain is brilliant. This is a real gem.”

Diane Wilkinson, Freelance Writer.

“I love a good story….but the best bit was that when the stories were compared to how pain works, it made sense.”

Dimos, Lorry Driver (not Hino’s), with chronic back pain.

“Persistent pain can be very difficult to understand. These stories provide an engaging, scientifically accurate way of explaining …they will help people understand their pain and help health care professionals understand the pain of their patients.”

Professor Franics J Keefe, Pain Prevention and Treatment Research Program, Duke University Medical Centre, Duke University, USA

Painful Yarns with Lorimer and Tom

Crossmodal Space and Crossmodal Attention

Edited by Charles Spence[1] and Jon Driver[2]

[1] Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University
[2] Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London

Many organisms possess multiple sensory systems, such as vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. The possession of multiple ways of sensing the world offers many benefits. However, combining information from different senses also poses many challenges for the nervous system. In recent years there has been dramatic progress in understanding how information from the different senses gets integrated in order to construct useful representations of external space. This volume brings together the leading researchers from a broad range of scientific approaches to present the first overview of this central topic in cognitive neuroscience.

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The Handbook of Multisensory Processes

Gemma Calvert[1], Charles Spence[2] and Barry E. Stein[3]

[1] Wellcome Career Development Fellow and Head of the Multisensory Research Group at the Department of Physiology and Center for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain at Oxford University
[2] Director of the Crossmodal Research Group at the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University
[3] Professor and Chair of the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at Wake Forest University School of Medicine

This book brings together research from different areas of the emerging field of multisensory integration. After many years of using a modality-specific ’sense-by-sense’ approach, researchers across different disciplines in neuroscience and psychology now recognize that perception is fundamentally a multisensory experience. To understand how the brain synthesizes information from the different senses, we must study not only how information from each sensory modality is decoded but also how this information interacts with the sensory processing taking place within other sensory channels. The findings in The Handbook of Multisensory Processes suggest that there are broad underlying principles that govern this interaction, regardless of the specific senses involved.

The book is organized thematically into eight sections; each of the 55 chapters presents a review by leading researchers in the field. The key themes include multisensory contributions to perception in humans; whether the sensory integration involved in speech perception is fundamentally different from other kinds of multisensory integration; multisensory processing in the midbrain and cortex in model species, including rat, cat, and monkey; behavioral consequences of multisensory integration; modern neuroimaging techniques, including EEG, PET, and fMRI, now being used to reveal the many sites of multisensory processing in the brain; multisensory processes that require postnatal sensory experience to emerge, with examples from multiple species; brain specialization and possible equivalence of brain regions; and clinical studies of such breakdowns of normal sensory integration as brain damage and synesthesia.

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The multisensory driver: Implications for ergonomic car interface design

Cristy Ho[1] and Charles Spence[2]

[1] Daiwa-Anglo Japanese Foundation, Japan.
[2] Professor of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, UK.

Driver inattention has been identified as one of the leading causes for car accidents, estimated to account for as much as 78 per cent. The issue of attentional overload while driving is likely to worsen in years to come, due in part to the availability of increasingly complex in-car technologies. Meanwhile, intelligent transport systems are being developed to assist drivers and to ensure a safe road environment. One approach to the design of ergonomic automobile systems is to integrate our understanding of the human information processing systems into the design process.

This book is dedicated to furthering the design of ergonomic multisensory interfaces by highlighting recent evidence in this area emerging from the fast-growing field of cognitive neuroscience. It focuses primarily on two aspects of driver information-processing: multisensory interactions and the spatial distribution of attention in driving. The Multisensory Driver provides an array of interface design guidelines together with a detailed review of current cognitive neuroscience and behavioral research in multisensory human perception. These guidelines will help to facilitate the future development of more ergonomic interfaces.

The discussion on spatial attention is particularly relevant for car interface designers, yet at the same time it should also appeal to cognitive psychologists interested in spatial attention and the applications of their theoretical research findings. By providing a detailed description of a cohesive series of psychophysical experiments on multisensory warning signals conducted in both laboratory and simulator settings, this book provides an approach for those in the engineering discipline who are interested to test their systems with human observers systematically.

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